—and why the instinct to keep it was correct. I am a relentless copyeditor. Nothing survives my revision passes by accident: not a clause, not a comma, not an adverb that has wandered in without earning its place. And yet, across three different novels, passages have arrived in single drafts and remained untouched through every
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Early in Atalanta of the Wild, there is a moment where her father’s warriors lead her out of the Arcadian mountains and onto open ground, and the prose names it plainly: “the golden fields of fertile Tegéa.” I did not plan that sentence as a statement about her arc. I wrote it because that is
What the Landscape Knows That the Character Does Not Read More »
There is a sentence men have told women for as long as sentences have been spoken: “Here is what you are for.” A daughter is for marrying well. A wife is for bearing sons. A queen is for outliving her usefulness with grace. A princess is for the alliance her body can purchase. None are
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On the difference between historical fiction with mythological elements and historical fantasy—and why the distinction matters I. A Question of Ontology This is the governing principle of my fiction, and it took me some years to articulate it: I do not write the ancient or Renaissance world as we understand it. I write it as
I. The Flood There is a flood upon the literary world, and it does not smell of river water. It smells of nothing at all—which is, perhaps, the most accurate description of what machine-generated prose brings to the page: a vast, odorless, grammatical nothing. I am an independent author of literary historical fiction. I write
Why the Independent Human Author Is Disappearing—and What You Can Do Read More »
!THIS PROMOTION HAS EXPIRED! THANKS TO THOSE WHO HAVE PURCHASED MY NOVELS. Esteemed Reader, It pleaseth me greatly to make known unto you that my novels shall be offered at a discount upon Smashwords during their Eighteenth Annual Summer and Winter Sale. The sale endureth the whole month of July, and ’tis a most propitious
I. The Bell That Tolled in the Wrong Tower Throughout the writing of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy, I needed bells. Not as atmosphere—as infrastructure. Cortona in 1450 AD ran on bells the way a modern city runs on clocks: they called the faithful to Mass, to Vespers, to the Compline;
The Research Rabbit Hole: When History Refuses to Let You Go Read More »
The Pressure That Broke By Chapter Eighteen of Asterios and the Labyrinth, I had been sustaining a level of emotional intensity that left even me—its author—in need of air. The novel had given romance, court intrigue, mythic sorceresses, Bronze Age siege warfare, and personal violation. Every scene carried weight. The narrative engine had been running
There is a sentence I keep returning to when I think about how to write the ancient world: a writer must disappear into it, not explain it from the outside. Mary Renault understood this better than almost anyone who has written historical fiction in English, and most novelists who have come after her, myself included, are
What Mary Renault Got Right That Most Historical Novelists Still Miss Read More »
I have said this before and will say it again: I am not a writer who builds worlds from nothing. Pure imagination is not enough for me. Without a foundation of something real beneath my feet, my creativity has nowhere to stand. And because my purpose is to carry a reader into another time and
